Data access is becoming increasingly important, as the extent of information sources that are available to computers increases with the exponential growth of networks, such as the Internet. Unfortunately, current database designs are inflexible and impose severe demands on user and computing power effort during unplanned queries.
Inflexibilities and high processing demands result from the current structure of known databases. Such structures generally seek to achieve quick access to records within the database by calculating the precise location of the record within the whole database. Inconvenient structural limitations are often imposed to facilitate this common database goal. For example, each record may be required to be the same size. This limitation may be avoided by using pointers, but a pointer structure requires user foresight and decisions at the outset, if database restructuring is to be avoided.
A fixed record size requirement only assures quick access when the record number is known. To have quick access when searching on field values, indexing needs to be performed linking those values with the record ID. In a typical database many index tables are needed. Maintenance of such tables requires an update of all of them whenever anything requires a change in the record identifiers—which in practice happens too often.
Numerous legacy databases need to be integrated with newer database systems. Normally this is done by converting them all to a single, modem relational database. This is an extremely difficult and time-consuming task under present systems, requiring a great deal of work to reconcile the different legacy structures into one new structure. Such integrations often incur extremely large costs, taking a very long time, disrupt business, and yet produce only partly satisfactory outcomes.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and system that facilitates queries for data from data sources. Because of the wide range of different organizational structures for the data sources that are available to many computers, it is desirable that improved data access be capable of operation across a range of computing platforms and organizational structures.